


Elation

by ElizaHiggs



Series: Amused, Impressed, Smitten [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, But still pretty graphic, F/M, Marriage, Not exactly smut, POV Remus Lupin, Remus is a virgin, Remus is super innocent, Romance, Sexual Content, happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 13:15:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6908677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElizaHiggs/pseuds/ElizaHiggs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus contemplates love and sex in the early days of his marriage | POV Remus</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elation

**Author's Note:**

> Pottermore says: "He swung constantly between elation that he was married to the woman of his dreams and terror of what he might have brought upon them both." These are those moments of elation.
> 
> I own none of these characters

Intimacy is his particular weakness.

His fondest childhood memories are those of being held: by his mother, when he was very small. By Madame Pomfrey, that kind woman, unable to watch a child suffer without discomfit, who would gently wipe his hair back from his forehead whenever he spent the day recovering from his early transformations in the hospital wing at Hogwarts. By Lily, who had understood best that human touch is a need, embracing him the longest of any of his friends, sitting close to him, her hand on his arm.

And then they had died (they had all died) and he had gone fourteen years with little meaningful human contact of any kind, until _she_ had tripped into number twelve Grimmauld Place and reached for him with a need of her own.

When she kissed him the night Dumbledore died, the night she dragged him from the hospital wing into an empty corner of the castle and demanded the truth from him, he'd known then that he couldn't possibly live without this - the feel of her lips under his, the nerves of his own on fire under the skin, the warmth spreading from his cheekbones down his neck, down deep into his chest, into his core, down to - no.

No, he could not give her up, not once he'd tasted her, no matter how selfish this need to possess, to cling.

He'd known then that he would give in to her and doom them both.

What he could not have known - what he could not possibly have fathomed - was the sheer human intimacy of sex. The first time he comes in her arms, it's so much sweeter than he could have imagined (although in his years of living like a monk, he's spent a lot of time trying to avoid imagining how sex must feel) that he actually cries, just a bit, and she laughs at him, and he laughs at himself, and they fall asleep like that, holding onto one another and laughing every time one of them has a renewed fit of euphoria.

Sex, he thinks, is like the opposite of his transformations, or perhaps its inverse: whereas the one rips him painfully from his humanity, the other lifts him, pleasurably, to its fullest form.

The next morning, in bed in the inn attached to the Scottish wizarding tavern where she's brought them that terrible, wonderful night, he's so struck by this other sweetness of waking next to someone, that he asks her (begs her, if he's honest about it) to marry him, and the selfishness of his own impulsive question takes him by surprise, as does the earnestness of her _yes_.

His own sex drive takes him by surprise too, and when he wants her two or three times a day, he starts to worry that he's wearing her out, or hurting her, but when he mentions it she just laughs and says that they're in the shagging-like-bunnies stage of their relationship, and insists that this is normal.

 _Normal_ is not the word he would have chosen to describe it, not when he's convinced that this must be heaven every time his wife's lips close around his cock, and he's certain he's done nothing in his life to deserve heaven.

Her stamina is the advantage of her youth.

The disadvantage, of course, of your wife being nearly fourteen years younger but vastly - by comparison - more experienced, is that she must be responsible for teaching you everything, which would be embarrassing if it weren't so much _fun_ , and if he weren't so eager to learn every spot on her body that elicits a response, because it's ludicrously, unfairly easy for her to give him pleasure, and spending a lifetime learning to reciprocate is the least he can do to make up for condemning her to the life of someone who loves a werewolf.

Married life is pleasurably, simplistically intimate too: being with her completely at her ease, dressed casually (as she clearly prefers) like a young Muggle woman, in ripped jeans slung low around her hipbones, and a tight Weird Sisters t-shirt that barely covers her long torso. One sunlit afternoon in the early days of their marriage, they're in the kitchen in her little flat when she knocks a sugar spoon to the floor and bends to retrieve it, and he sees the electric green lace of her panties peaking just above the waistline of her trousers. He averts his eyes instinctually before he remembers that this woman is his wife, and that they are alone, and that she (probably) won't mind knowing how aroused he is by her. When he reaches out a shaking hand to graze her backside, asking for intimacy for the first time in his life, she smiles wickedly over her shoulder at him, and he draws her to him and pulls the loud t-shirt over her head.

And how wonderful, after two years of desperately trying to ignore the little shocks that shoot from his stomach into his gut every time she licks her lips, to be able to reach over and kiss those lips, like it's the most natural thing in the world. To touch her, hold her, be held by her, and - best of all - to slip into bed next to her every night and pull the bedcovers over them both.

His favorite position is the one she calls _missionary_ , because he adores the feeling of coming with her arms and legs wrapped round him, and when she figures that out, she fights him playfully for the top. He's happy to discover than even after a year of living underground, he's still physically stronger than her, although he doesn't mind giving in occasionally, because the feeling of her bare skin writhing above him as she comes is a whole different kind of pleasure.

After several weeks - the sweetest of his life - his wife suggests they take wands to bed, and she curses him with the _Petrificus Totalus_ , and he lies paralyzed on the bed as she teases him, sucking on a cock that cannot possibly come, filling his unwilling silence with her own moans, until finally she lifts the curse as she slips herself onto him, and his release is almost instant, and he comes rather wildly beneath her. Once he's caught his breath, he happily takes his revenge, although he Binds her to the bed in lieu of freezing her, because he _likes_ the feeling of her squirming helplessly beneath his tongue as her body struggles to reach its peak. And he's really not, he thinks, the best tease, because he's only too happy to help her body achieve its objective, sending her over the edge and allowing her to catch her breath only briefly before beginning again.

Their first full moon together, his body is good for nothing, least of all passionate love-making, for a few days afterward. He admits this particular regret to her from his invalid position on the couch, his head on her lap as she gently pulls her fingers through his greying hair, but she just smiles and reminds him that there will be a few days a month when she, too, is not quite game, and he chuckles at the comparison. It's not the same as sex, but for that moment, it's enough: the feeling of her laughter rippling through her core muscles and her fingers moving through his hair.

And then her period doesn't come.

He had forgotten, of course, that sex is not only pleasurable, but also creative. This, he thinks, is where his insatiable need for intimacy has led: to the destruction of lives, to the damnation of his wife and whatever innocent new life they have created. So he runs - to Harry, to Lily's child who, wiser than his years, sends him home again, to learn to put the needs of others above not only his own needs, but also his own fears.

When he returns to her, he vows (for the second time) never to leave her again, but he assumes that intimacy is something that, like trust, can never be fully restored once broken, and he knows he has broken them.

And though she is furious, and frightened, she pulls him into bed anyway and lets him at least hold her, and they fall asleep together much as they did that first night, arms around one another, and when he wakes in the middle of the night to her hands on his body and her lips on his face, Remus discovers that forgiveness is even sweeter than sex.


End file.
